Real-Estate Services Company Protects 1,000 Exchange Online Mailboxes with NAKIVO
Business Challenge
Orange Coast Title Company (OCT) has been serving Real Estate Consumers and Professionals in Southern California since 1974, and has recently begun an expansion program throughout the Western United States. The company operates in residential resale, building/commercial, direct lender, trustee sales guarantees, and government agencies markets. Orange Coast Title Company provides its customers with Title and Escrow needs, along with lending and short sale services. OCT has over 70 offices across the United States and has two datacenters, which consist of a primary site and a disaster recovery site. The two datacenters contain approximately 20 physical servers and 150 VMware VMs.
OCT’s virtual infrastructure runs various applications that are necessary for their Title and Escrow programs, along with several customer service applications. In addition, the company’s VMs hold NPPI data, various files, Microsoft Exchange email data, and Microsoft SQL databases. Since the company holds public-sensitive data that needs to be kept indefinitely, VM backup and recovery are extremely important for their business’ success. Moreover, since OCT deals with banks, who require data to be kept securely and widely available at all times, any downtime or data loss would be unacceptable and could impact the company’s business severely.
OCT has protected their data and applications with a different VM backup solutions for some time, but experienced problems with multiple errors when it came to backing up and recovering. “The problems ranged from getting too many failed backup jobs and on top of that, there were licensing problems every time we added a host to our cluster. Furthermore, we did not enjoy the fact that an agent had to be created per host; we definitely wanted to have agentless deployment. Thus, we decided to look for another VM backup solution that would offer us reliability, better functionality, ease of use, and peace of mind,” says Cameron Rezvani, Senior Systems Engineer at Orange Coast Title Company.
Solution
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an agentless VM backup solution that is built specifically for virtualization, while providing a wide range of features and affordable pricing. Orange Coast Title Company decided to select NAKIVO Backup & Replication as their new backup product for protecting their critical data. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is easy to deploy and manage, requires almost no additional time spent on backup administration, and provides ease in terms of license management. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication only took 15 minutes to setup and deploy, as we did not even need a dedicated backup server to run the software. I enjoy the use of the web interface as it is not only easy to use, but is also highly functional and configurable,” says Cameron.
Orange Coast Title Company selected VM backup appliance based on a Synology NAS as their preferred method of deploying NAKIVO Backup & Replication. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a Synology NAS, all VM data protection components are unified under one roof, and the appliance does not consume any additional resource. “By deploying NAKIVO Backup & Replication on our Synology NAS, we were able to avoid the need to deploy any VMs in order to run VM backup or replication jobs,” says Cameron.
VM backup and VM replication provide Orange Coast Title Company with the functionality that they require to protect their VMs in an efficient and reliable way. With VM replication, the company can replicate the most critical VMs to their secondary site, and if a disaster occurs at their primary site, they can fail over from the source VMs to VM replicas. VM backup allows the company to schedule and run VM backups without any errors, and within a much faster time in comparison to the company’s previous backup product. “Since there is no longer a need for any agents, VM backups run fairly fast, as we can run VM backups of 90+ TB virtual environment once a week. Previously, this was only possible to do once a month, but since NAKIVO Backup & Replication runs VM backups pretty fast, we have now switched to once a week. Moreover, we no longer see constant errors, which is a relief,” says Cameron.
Since switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication for protecting their virtual environment, Orange Coast Title Company has also decided to look into Microsoft Office 365 backup for Exchange Online. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers incremental Microsoft 365 backup for Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online data. The company recently migrated to Microsoft Office 365, and were previously running snapshots and journaling for backing up mailboxes. One disadvantage with the previous approach was the lack of folder structure backups. “Since we enjoyed NAKIVO Backup & Replication so much, we decided to protect 1,000 Exchange Online mailboxes. We can now back up Office 365 data quickly as well as recover emails, files, and folders with ease,” says Cameron.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS provides Orange Coast Title Company with ease of deployment and management, and improved VM backup performance and time savings in terms of backup administration. The previous backup solution required agents to be installed and was constantly giving the IT team errors. By deploying NAKIVO Backup & Replication directly on a Synology NAS, the IT team was able to start backing up their VMs four times faster as compared to their previous backup product. With Microsoft Office 365 backup, the company now performs fast backups of Exchange Online backups and performs near-instant recovery of emails, files, and folders. Lastly, the IT team was able to save a significant amount of time on backup administration since NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides an easy-to-use web interface. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication saved us a significant amount of time and money. The product is four times faster, does not give us constant errors, and took just 15 minutes to setup and deploy. We protect our virtual environment and Microsoft Office 365 data as well. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provided us with ease-of-use and peace of mind for our business,” says Cameron.
About Orange Coast Title Company
Orange Coast Title Company has been serving Real Estate Consumers and Professionals since 1974, starting in Orange County, California. Today OCT is licensed in 46 states with a 50-state solution to closing real estate transactions. The company’s COMMITMENT TO SERVICE is guided by what they call THE OCT WAY, which includes “Customer is KING” and “Whatever it Takes” among other tenets that OCT holds as essential to their success. OCT has a deserved reputation for closing the toughest deals, and is one of the largest underwritten title companies in the United States. For more information, please visit www.octitle.com.